Quick Successions: New Mexico Edition

As the semester wound down, we went to Alamogordo, New Mexico and visited White Sands National Monument. We went with my college roommates and their families and had a picnic between sledding sessions. It was 65 degrees, but the gypsum was cold. https://www.newmexico.org/places-to-go/regions-cities/southeast/white-sands-national-monument/ They grow lots of pistachios in this part of the world and here is the largest of them. We stopped for some yummy pistachio ice cream and bought some nuts to take home for holiday baking. 

The first weekend in December is the Christmas Tree Festival in Albuquerque. Last year, we went and really enjoyed it so off we went again this year.

November started out by rocking the vote. New Mexico has some of the most fair and open elections in the country and there are lots of ways to vote, but I went on to campus and voted in the student union building with the undergraduates. It was packed with students reading for class while standing in line and talking about the political issues. New Mexico only has 2.2 million people (not all of whom are old enough to vote) and something like 400,000 voted early and still the polls were packed. I was impressed. One of our neighbors is going back to school and sometimes her husband works late, so this boy and his brother come and play with Hannah. This evening they had a robotics kit and they put it together all themselves and then tested it in the kitchen. That spawned a good joke in the neighborhood that if you take your kids to some people's houses, they watch TV or make cookies. But at our place, you do robotic engineering. Then I was off to my 8th conference of the Nat...